Comparing Kim And The English Patient
Kim, by Rudyard Kipling, and The English Patient, by Michael Ondaatje, were created almost a century apart by authors with different cultural backgrounds, yet they are each dependent on the converging stories of Western and Eastern characters, whose worlds and cultures have become intertwined by personal choice or inclination as well as by political and historical forces beyond their control. Ondaatje weaves culturally diverse voices and stories together in the microcosm of a deserted Italian villa, where Hana’s refuge and solace in reading Kim foreshadows the arrival of Kip and their ensuing relationship. An examination of each novel’s characters reveals disparate voices which have been irrevocably altered by the influences of colonization;
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The “young boy in India” is Kim, the title character of Kipling’s novel, who is representative of both the British Empire in India and an exotic and romanticized colonial impression of the East. Kim’s view of India is created by a foreigner, who portrays India from abroad with all the colour, chaos, and naïveté which that entails. Hana and the English patient are alone in the villa at the beginning of the novel, and the book serves as a textual access to another world. Kipling’s story “intoxicates” them, and serves as an escape for the two of them as “those running away from or running towards a war” (Ondaatje 93). Hana reads Kim aloud to her patient, and takes comfort in the familiar story. Ondaatje writes: “All this occurred before the sapper entered their lives, as if out of this fiction. As if the pages of Kipling had been rubbed in the night like a magic lamp. A drug of wonders” (Ondaatje 94). His language foreshadows Kip’s arrival at the villa and portrays Kip as an otherworldly figure; he comes into their lives as though from a fantasy, a story. This is an allusion to Kipling’s claim that words are the ultimate drug. For both Caravaggio and the English patient the use of morphine eases their pain and makes them able to speak of that which would otherwise have gone unspoken; they combine the physical drug with the fascination of the story. Kip enters their lives like a “drug of wonders” to fulfill the same
The “young boy in India” is Kim, the title character of Kipling’s novel, who is representative of both the British Empire in India and an exotic and romanticized colonial impression of the East. Kim’s view of India is created by a foreigner, who portrays India from abroad with all the colour, chaos, and naïveté which that entails. Hana and the English patient are alone in the villa at the beginning of the novel, and the book serves as a textual access to another world. Kipling’s story “intoxicates” them, and serves as an escape for the two of them as “those running away from or running towards a war” (Ondaatje 93). Hana reads Kim aloud to her patient, and takes comfort in the familiar story. Ondaatje writes: “All this occurred before the sapper entered their lives, as if out of this fiction. As if the pages of Kipling had been rubbed in the night like a magic lamp. A drug of wonders” (Ondaatje 94). His language foreshadows Kip’s arrival at the villa and portrays Kip as an otherworldly figure; he comes into their lives as though from a fantasy, a story. This is an allusion to Kipling’s claim that words are the ultimate drug. For both Caravaggio and the English patient the use of morphine eases their pain and makes them able to speak of that which would otherwise have gone unspoken; they combine the physical drug with the fascination of the story. Kip enters their lives like a “drug of wonders” to fulfill the same